Europeans didn’t kick any more ass in tropical America did they?
There was never a truly permanent European colony set up in tropical America. There were any number of get-rich-quick schemes and military bases with associated European governors but no European colonies. That is precisely comparable to the European experience in tropical Africa excluding (arguably) Cape Town and Jo’burg (and those two cities are barely tropical).
Compare that to temperate America where there were countless European colonies established, and most prospered.
Even genetically the Europeans never prospered in tropical America. As you pointed out most native tropical Americans were killed. That meant that the European entrepreneurs and military made up a relatively massive amount of the genetics of the area. And yet it would be all but impossible to find someone in tropical America who had only or even primarily European blood. The Europeans have been genetically swamped. There may be relatively more European genetic legacy in tropical America than in Africa but that’s solely because they started with less competing non-European genetic material. Compare that to temperate America or Australia where European genes dominate convincingly.
I can’t see in what way Europeans were any more successful in tropical America than in tropical Africa. They never dominated either location genetically. Although a higher starting base and more favourable disease resistance led to slightly better results in the Americas it is in no way comparable to European genetic impact in temperate America or temperate Australia. The cultural, economic and military successes of Europeans seems to be equivalent in both tropical Africa and Tropical America, although once again a smaller and more fragile local population probably made the effect somewhat greater in the Americas.
Can I ask you in what way you believe that Europeans dominated the Americas that they didn’t dominate Africa that can’t be explained simply because the Americas had a much smaller and resultantly culturally impoverished population?
Wheat usually self-fertilizes, but will also sometimetimes cross-fertilize. Maybe corn will not do the later without help. All I know there is a difference between corn and wheat. (corn is more different form its wild ancestor than what, but I was thinking of a another differenece)
Corn is, to quote a Scientific American article on it from a few decades back, “a biological monstrosity”. I don’t think it needs human help to germinate, but modern people-eaten corn contains huge numbers of kernels stuck close together and easy to eat, hundreds to a “cob”. Look at the natural-living ancestor – it has perhaps six “kernels” stuck onto something you’d only call a “cob” because it holds all the kernels. Human breeding and cultivation produced modern corn, brede to be useful to humans. “real” corn doesn’t have problems dropping off its cob and doesn’t drop ridiculous numbers of kernels to compete pointlessly with each other for precious resources. I’m not sure that modern corn would survive in the wild.
Bolding mine. This statement confuses me. Are not the Spanish and Portuguese European and do these ethnicities not dominate Central and South America? Did you mean just British and not European? Please explain.
Cape Town isn’t remotely tropical. We have a lovely Mediterranean climate, very suitable for European crops. Our biggest crops are wheat, grapes and fruit like apples, pears etc.
Jo’burg benefits from high altitude, lessening the effect of its latitude somewhat. Also, it’s only really been a city worth speaking of since late Victorian times, way after any wave of colonisation was over.
I just have one thing to add: dropzone , the thesis of GG&S may not be controversial to you or most 'dopers, but it’s certainly a kick up the arse for all the mouthbreathing Europhiles and white supremacists out there. there may be more of them than you think - anyone who uses the term “those people” or “lesser races”, f’rex
The Spanish and Portugese may be european, but very few of the poeple at the top in Latin America are pureblood Spanish/Portugese anymore. This especially holds true for the more tropical bits like Brazil. Large amounts of Indian and African inheritance, hell, in Brazil there’s probably just as much Japanese as Portugese by now.
Central Africa is where early hominids evolved, and where other closely related primates live. Mesoamerica isn’t. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that the former would have a bigger pool of local diseases to which humans are susceptible.
Eurasian populations had more disease resistance than most others because of their trade and domestic animals, but they were semi-isolated from the central African disease pool (and thus got clobbered by it when they did try moving in).
First of all, I’ll confess that I do not have a good memory of him writing that in the book, which may mean that it is time to go reread it. That being said, Diamond covers (if I recall) about 11,000 years of history. Only in the last 500-1,000 have the Europeans really taken off. It seems odd to me that the “head start” would keep the Middle East in play as a great power (even through the Ottoman Empire) for 10,000 years, but then suddenly (in terms of overall time) the natural climate of Europe and its fertile and wet conditions would make the difference in a short span of time.
That wasn’t my point. I think there is a difference between dominating and ability to resist domination. And to my understanding, the Afghanis have resisted invasions in part because of their lack of resources and greater adaptability to the hostile and resource poor climate they live in.
Actually, his thesis was the complete opposite. His basic premise was that nearly all the factors that lead to european success were already there by the end of the ice age and many far before that. A sufficiently smart alien civilisation visiting earth at 11,000BC would be able to predict, due to purely geographical factors, the inevitability of europe dominating the globe. This, in essense was what was so startling about his thesis and what makes it so controversial.
However, for corn to spread from the temperate regions in South America to the temperate regions in North America (or vice versa), it has to pass through the equatorial regions. Every time a culture may have tried to move corn north-south, they had to cope with differing day-night cycles and climates.
Eurasian grains, however, could spread largely east-west, with similar day-night cycles and less-radical latitude changes.
But in addition to epidemics and hunting and, specifically, the particularly wasteful hunting methods of the early Americans, like setting fires to drive entire herds off cliffs*, there were also the sudden (in geological and evolutionary terms) ecological changes from the retreating glaciers.
But yeah, I already admitted I need to read the book.
No snark read into it and I was excessively huffy. Just a BA in Anthropology and Archeology from a second-tier state school but I like to think that puts my expertise, while nowhere closer to that of, say, CalMeacham, still a bit above that of a schlub off the street.
Don’tcha just laugh when you hear people go on about how American Indians are “one with nature” and “the original environmentalists?”
Many thanks for the compliment, but I’m not sure I deserve it.
To tell the truth, I think I’m just a Schlub off the street in these matters. Just a well-read schlub off th street. I’ve got degrees in physics and engineering, which doesn’t really qualify me to pronounce on matters anthropological and archaeological. Although I have been doing so, for years. My defense is that I try to back it up with cites. And God knows, this Board won’t let you get away with less than that.
Actually, it spread north and south from southern Mexico and, except in the furthest south regions, didn’t need to pass through the equator and, even then, it spread along the cool, tropical highlands that connect North and South Amerca so the climate was not that much different from one terminus to the other. Its spread may not have been as fast as wheat’s but it managed.
Diamond’s statement on “widespread dependence on protein-poor corn” does not take into account the other crops being grown, especially beans and squashes, or the technique of soaking corn in lye to remove its seed coat and, incidentally, improve its nutritional value. Many early Americans ate a more balanced diet than their European contemporaries.
I really do have to investigate why nobody domesticated the bison. I’ve seen some tame ones that people can even ride. Imagine what you could have if somebody started the process a couple thousand years ago.
What’s funny is that I’m the one working as an engineer and you’re the one with the books on ancient history!
Diamond goes into this. If I remember correctly, it has something to do with bison not being a herdable creature. He notes that even today, with modern technology, there have been no successful attempts at large scale, economic ranching of bison, kangaroo, emu etc. They still remain largely novelty meats.
Not a herdable creature? BISON?!?!?! How did he explain them covering the landscape, then? Were vast herds of bison coincidental gatherings? “Oh, hi, Bob. Wasn’t expecting to see you here. Looks like everybody showed up. Word must’ve got around about the good grazing here.”
Anyway, I’m thinking of them more as draft animals than as a food source, though using your dogs to keep a small herd in line should be doable.
They’re herd creatures, but there are a lot of other factors which make an animal domesticatable. According to Diamond, bison are too surly to be domesticated despite their similarity to cows in other ways. Think of Zebras which have never been domesticated though they look and act a lot like horses. Diamond talks a lot about this issue. Large cats, hippos, elephants, there are a lot of large animals which could not be domesticated.
Perhaps Borneo was a bad example. I wasn’t really looking for an actual literal island, just an example of some place out of the way. It is DEFINITELY clear to me that the more isolated from the rest of humanity any place is, the less likely it is to end up “advanced”. That’s a relatively trivial observation.
I’d guess, without knowing much about southeast Asian geography, that Borneo is much more isolated from the mainland than Britain. A better analogue to Britain would be Japan.
I also note that two people in this thread, commenting about China vs. Europe, have said exactly opposite things. One said that China has NOT been less advanced than Europe, with the industrial revolution just being a random blip, and the other saying that the greater geographic diversity, leading to multiple competing nations, led to Europe’s advancement.
This is one of the areas he’s wrong. There is large scale, economic ranching of bison. Thing is, they’re only just barely domesticated. The usual criterion is control over breeding, and in the case of bison, you just get the hell out of the way at that time of year. The only way to control which animals breed with which is to put them into seperate herds. But you don’t want to have ten small herds of a bull and a dozen cows, because the bulls are lazy if there aren’t other bulls around to threaten them. So by and large, the bison are left to figure out the breeding stuff on their own.
I think that in time the idea that the bison isn’t domesticable will be proven laughable. They’ve all the necessary features, particularly the hierarchical social structure, and they aren’t as surly as all that. (Not that I’d fancy being confined in a small pen with a bull, mind you, but the same could be said of many Bos taurus bulls.) I really don’t know how you’d go about domesticating them if you weren’t already growing crops, though, and there wasn’t much overlap between bison range and sedentary agriculture in North America.